POST-STORM PROTECTION FROM MOLD

Days of constant rain may trigger a problem in your very own home. Mold growth originates from roof leaks or faulty plumbing. To prevent mold from starting and spreading, the moisture in your home must be controlled.

WeatherREADY offers helpful ideas on how to control and remove growth from your walls, roof, and the like.

• To remove mold growth from hard surfaces use commercial products, soap and water, or a bleach solution of no more than 1 cup of bleach in 1 gallon of water. Use a stiff brush on rough surface materials such as concrete. If you choose to use bleach to remove mold: Never mix bleach with ammonia or other household cleaners. Mixing bleach with ammonia or other cleaning products will produce dangerous, toxic fumes.
• Open windows and doors to provide fresh air.
• Wear non-porous gloves and protective eye wear.
• If the area to be cleaned is more than 10 square feet, consult the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guide titled Mold Remediation in Schools and Commercial Buildings (go to http://www.epa.gov/mold/mold_remediation.html)
• Always follow the manufacturer's instructions when using bleach or any other cleaning product.
• If you plan to be inside the building for a while or you plan to clean up mold, you should buy an N95 mask at your local home supply store and wear it while in the building. Make certain that you follow instructions on the package for fitting the mask tightly to your face. If you go back into the building for a short time and are not cleaning up mold, you do not need to wear an N95 mask.

Preventing hospital bed fires in nursing homes

The Food and Drug Administration reported that it had received 95 reports from 1993 to 2003 of fires involving electrically powered hospital beds, with 75 percent associated with failed motor starting capacitors and overheated motors.Awareness of fire risks and precautions related to electrically operated beds is important to protect nursing home residents and staff against the risk of injury or death and to prevent significant property damage.

Here are some safety tips from Nursing Homes Magazine to prevent fires caused by hospital beds:

* When plugging in a bed, visually inspect the bed’s power cord for damage from, among other possibilities, use, age, crushing, pinching, shearing, cutting, cleaning solutions, bed movement, human and equipment traffic, and furniture placement
* After inspection, connect the power cord directly into a wall-mounted outlet that is in good working order and capable of accommodating a heavy-duty or hospital-grade plug.
* Do not cover the bed’s power cord with a rug or carpet. Doing so may impede normal air flow which, in turn, can lead to greater heat buildup.
* Test the bed to ensure that it moves freely to its full limit. Confirm that the bed’s vertical motion does not interfere with the bed’s power cord or plug.
* Examine the bed’s hand and panel controls, including patient lockout features, to ensure that the bed is working properly and can move freely without damaging any cords.
* Check bed-occupancy monitors and all other equipment in the resident’s room that has plug-in power supplies for indications of overheating or physical damage.

Maintaining electric power during a disaster

JCAHO recently issued a Sentinel Event Alert that recommends specific steps healthcare organizations can take to maintain electrical power supply during a natural disaster.

According to the Alert, compliance with minimum National Fire Protection Association codes is not enough to assure the safety of patients and their care during an emergency situation. Many health care organizations did not have sufficient power to ventilate facilities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and patient evacuations were delayed because of the unavailability of electricity-dependent elevators to transport patients.

To reduce risks to patients created by power failures, JCAHO’s Alert recommends steps that health care organizations take:

· Match the critical equipment and systems needed in an extended emergency against the equipment and systems actually on the emergency power system.
· Inventory emergency power systems and the loads they serve.
· Provide training for and test those who operate and maintain the emergency power supply system.
· Ensure that generator fuel is available and usable.
· Assure that the organization management and clinical leaders know how long emergency power will be available and what locations within the facility will and will not have emergency power in the event of an electrical outage.
· Establish contingency plans for doctors and other caregivers to follow during losses of electrical power.

In addition to the Alert, the Joint Commission is adding a new requirement in 2007 that organizations test emergency generators at least once every 36 months for a minimum of four continuous hours. Facilities already must test their generators 12 times a year for 30 minutes. If a test fails, the organization must immediately implement stop-gap measures until a permanent fix can be put into place.

Doctors-in-training commit medical errors

About one-third of American doctors-in-training report making at least one major error during the recent past, a new survey in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports.

Thirty-four percent of respondents reported making at least one major medical error during the period under study; 43 percent of residents completing at least one year of training reported errors.

Of the participants, 20 percent reported one error, 6 percent reported two errors, and 8 percent reported three or more errors during the study period. An average of 14.7 percent of participants said they had made an error in the past three months.

The errors were generally attributed to personal distress and burnout. “Historically, there has been an attitude that training to be a doctor is stressful,” Dr. Tait Shanafelt, professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic and author of the study said. “What we are starting to explore is that there may be consequences to the distress, that it may actually influence the care they provide.”This is a challenging problem,” Dr. Shanafelt said. “There appear to be both personal and professional factors that contribute to distress, so any possible solutions are going to need to both address all the potential sources of distress and set up a support system to address stress as it develops.”

New bird flu drugs on the horizon

With instances of resistance to Tamiflu, the only drug effective against the H5N1 bird flu virus, reported, there is an urgent need to develop new drugs that can be used to treat infection.

The Voice of America reports that British doctors have peered inside a key protein on the surface of the virus, obtaining structural information that chemists could use to design new drugs to block it. The new drugs would avoid the resistance that some influenza viruses have already acquired to Tamiflu.

Researchers used advanced X-ray technology to provide an "atomic picture" of the atoms that comprise one of the two surface proteins in the H5N1 virus.

Neuraminidase – the “N” in H5N1 – is the protein in bird flu that allows the virus to spread to other cells in the body. Drugs currently used to treat bird flu are based on other neuraminidase models that are not specific to H5N1.

By identifying H5N1’s unique blueprint, researchers may one day be able to use drugs that home in on the strain that has killed 139 people in the past three years.

The problem is that the new drugs are five years away, but it could potentially be shortened as countries accelerate their pandemic preparedness plans.